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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under number 1990.018.
Soy, más, estoy. Respiro.
Lo profundo es el aire.
La realidad me inventa,
Soy su leyenda. Salve!
I am; I am here and now.
I breathe the deepest air.
Reality invents me.
I am its legend. Hail!
(Jorge Guillen, 'Más Alla' quoted in Affirmation a Bilingual Anthology 1919-1966, Oklahoma 1968, pp. 30-31).
Lo Profundo es el aire, Estella III is part of an important series of works that take their name from a line in a poem by Jorge Guillen a poet from the generation of '27 and close friend of the artist. Guillen's poem 'Más Alla' includes the line 'lo profundo es el aire' in a verse that seems to articulate the symbiotic relationship between existence, time, material reality and the seeming nothingness of the air. As Chillida must have recognised, it is a verse that describes perfectly the central aesthetic of his own work with its preoccupation with articulating the almost mystical relationship between space and material.
In the series of works named Lo Profundo es el aire, Chillida explored questions of time, space and material in a variety of very different media that included, steel, alabaster and granite. Each of these works deliberately established a visual dialogue between the solidity, texture and rigidity of the material and its infusion by empty space in such a way that a lyrical contrast and almost fluid penetration of one by the other was expressed by the work as a whole.
In Lo Profundo es el aire, Estella III Chillida has used Indian granite, an extremely hard stone with a remarkably smooth surface that is quarried using traditional techniques that maintain the natural condition of the stone and the patterns of its fissures. Because of its heavy earth-like qualities, in using this stone Chillida was particularly interested in carving out an internal space that linked its dark interior with the outside world penetrating it in such a way that it brings light to the innermost recesses of the stone. His aim was, as the title of the work suggests, to infuse the profound depths of the dense solidity of the stone with the airy lightness of space.
The grandiose Lo Profundo es el aire series was to have culminated with Chillida's vast unfinished project in Tindaya, a mountain on the island of Fuerteventura. There, Chillida hoped to create an enormous open space in the interior of the mountain. It was to be a 50 square metre cube pierced with two openings, one for sunlight and another for moonlight, each admitting light to the heart of the mountain by either day or night. Symbolic of the meeting place between solid and void, this spatial cube would, he hoped, provide a neutral meeting place for people to congregate, detached from the burden of their cultural and religious backgrounds.
Soy, más, estoy. Respiro.
Lo profundo es el aire.
La realidad me inventa,
Soy su leyenda. Salve!
I am; I am here and now.
I breathe the deepest air.
Reality invents me.
I am its legend. Hail!
(Jorge Guillen, 'Más Alla' quoted in Affirmation a Bilingual Anthology 1919-1966, Oklahoma 1968, pp. 30-31).
Lo Profundo es el aire, Estella III is part of an important series of works that take their name from a line in a poem by Jorge Guillen a poet from the generation of '27 and close friend of the artist. Guillen's poem 'Más Alla' includes the line 'lo profundo es el aire' in a verse that seems to articulate the symbiotic relationship between existence, time, material reality and the seeming nothingness of the air. As Chillida must have recognised, it is a verse that describes perfectly the central aesthetic of his own work with its preoccupation with articulating the almost mystical relationship between space and material.
In the series of works named Lo Profundo es el aire, Chillida explored questions of time, space and material in a variety of very different media that included, steel, alabaster and granite. Each of these works deliberately established a visual dialogue between the solidity, texture and rigidity of the material and its infusion by empty space in such a way that a lyrical contrast and almost fluid penetration of one by the other was expressed by the work as a whole.
In Lo Profundo es el aire, Estella III Chillida has used Indian granite, an extremely hard stone with a remarkably smooth surface that is quarried using traditional techniques that maintain the natural condition of the stone and the patterns of its fissures. Because of its heavy earth-like qualities, in using this stone Chillida was particularly interested in carving out an internal space that linked its dark interior with the outside world penetrating it in such a way that it brings light to the innermost recesses of the stone. His aim was, as the title of the work suggests, to infuse the profound depths of the dense solidity of the stone with the airy lightness of space.
The grandiose Lo Profundo es el aire series was to have culminated with Chillida's vast unfinished project in Tindaya, a mountain on the island of Fuerteventura. There, Chillida hoped to create an enormous open space in the interior of the mountain. It was to be a 50 square metre cube pierced with two openings, one for sunlight and another for moonlight, each admitting light to the heart of the mountain by either day or night. Symbolic of the meeting place between solid and void, this spatial cube would, he hoped, provide a neutral meeting place for people to congregate, detached from the burden of their cultural and religious backgrounds.